Brief Musing On Time and Entropy

My physics education was so long ago it was practically in the dark ages. Cold fusion was going to be a reality within five years.  That's probably not much of a grounding epoch, since people are still saying that. Suffice it to say it was a long time ago. Most of what I remember is a fever dream of strange possibilities that got even stranger the deeper you delved into them. Like Alice, I came out of the looking glass and settled upon more mundane pursuits, but a few things stuck with me over the years.

One thing, which we learned early on, was that our equations gave us two answers for time. Forward time and Negative time. We were taught to discard the negative one, usually with some hand-waving, and certainly for Newtonian physics, it's all fine and good. But I always liked the possiblity of the negative time solution. It was like a secret we got to keep, that even though we didn't use it, nothing in the math prevented it from being true. If you've ever had an event in your life that you wanted, more than anything, to go back in change, you'll understand why I write the other time solution, if not on paper, then at least in the back of my mind, where I occasionally take it out and ponder it. It's not a unique idea.

https://smile.amazon.com/Time-Traveler-Scientists-Personal-Mission-ebook/dp/B001T4ZHRC/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1498655618&sr=8-6&keywords=time+traveler

The thing I detested most, the thing I found most disturbing was entropy. Without any math you can describe it like this. Entropy is a measure of disorder of a system. Entropy never decreases. The universe is a system and will eventually reach a point of disorder so that nothing more can be accomplished. This is known as the heat death of the universe. I distinctly remember working out the proof on an exam, and sitting in my chair, my lap covered in eraser crumbs and graphite, thinking, no, I don't accept this. My math was right. I had followed the rules and surely would get the points for showing my work. But it bothered me. To think of all the effort, all the striving, all of our endeavoring to make order of the chaos, and it's all going in the opposite direction whether we like it or not. 

Some may not be surprised that the thing I love the most (that time is malleable) and the thing I hate the most (that nothing productive will result from the striking of time's arrow) are intimately connected. It can be said that entropy defines the arrow of time. But what if something were amiss, something that deflated the pomposity of entropy while giving a little credence to the malleability of time? What it time isn't as sticky as we've been led to believe? What if we have yet to discover what lies in the shadow we cast while we face ever forward?